Guild Wars + Third-person Shooter.  Those are my first impressions.  And you don’t have to aim, really; just hit your mouse button, and you’re shooting at the enemy.  I like the mechanics so far, but I’m not sure of a few things.

The story so far is pretty much “Guild Wars in Space”.  It starts very much as Guild Wars did, with you cast as a soldier defending your people in a post-cataclysmic world.  I thought the Guild Wars story was pretty week, so I don’t know if this one will be any better based on what I saw.

Game play gives you some very third-person shooter style mechanics.  Movement is much more free than I’m used to in an RPG-style MMO.  Targeting is as simple as pointing and clicking, ala Diablo, but in 3D.  Skills and weapons are a left click/right click affair, also much like Diablo, which is actually not a bad way to do it.

Missions so far are anything but epic.  I know, I’m still just getting through the tutorial; what could I really expect?  Well, I’ll tell you.  I expect more than “find this terrible dude you’ve never met who is causing us so much trouble and get him!” type of missions.  There’s no connection to anything I care about there.  Did this guy kill my uncle, and I need revenge?  Nope, just sort of met him when I walked into that area of the map.  It may be that I’m too much a single-player kind of guy; the last RPG I loved was KOTOR.  I think, however, that more effort could be made to giving us single-player depth of story in an MMO. 

I’ll give it a couple more hours of gameplay and come back if there’s anything exciting.  Until then, my thought is that this will probably be good choice if you really liked Guild Wars.  If you felt a little let down by Guild Wars, this is about the same idea (so far) so you may want to skip it.